Related Disclosures
This patent application contains subject matter disclosed in Disclosure Document Numbers 411,887; 417,369 and 417,458.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to search engines, and more particularly pertains to a method for organizing information by monitoring the search activity of users.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The Internet is an extensive network of computer systems which allows a user to connect with various computer servers or systems. The Internet permits users to send and receive data between computers connected to this network. This data may include web sites, home pages, databases, text collections, audio, video or any other type of information made available over the Internet (collectively referred to as "articles") from a computer server connected to the Internet. The articles may also include key terms representing selected portions of the information contained in the article. These key terms are available over the Internet to other computers and permit these other computers to locate the article.
To locate articles on the Internet, a user of a remote computer searches for the key terms using a search program known as a search engine. Examples of search engines currently available on the Internet include "Yahoo!".TM., "Excite".TM., and "Alta Vista".TM.. These programs allow the remote user to type in one or more search terms, typically as a combination of English words. The search terms may be connected by Boolean logic operators or may be truncated and combined with wild card terms to form a search query.
The search engine then compares the search query with the key terms from the articles and retrieves at least a portion of the articles having key terms which match the search query. The search engine will then display to the user the portion of the article such as the title. The user can then scroll through these retrieved portions of the articles and select a desired article.
Conventional key word searching and various prior art methods of accomplishing such key word searching are disclosed in at least the following patents, which are herein incorporated by reference:
______________________________________ U.S. Pat. No. Title ______________________________________ 5,588,060 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR A KEY- MANAGEMENT SCHEME FOR INTERNET PROTOCOLS; 5,546,390 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR RADIX DECISION PACKET PROCESSING; 5,528,757 ROUTING SYSTEM FOR RETRIEVING REQUESTED PROGRAM BY DISCARDING RECEIVED PRO- GRAM IDENTICAL WITH STORED PROGRAMS AND TRANSFERRING THE RECEIVED PROGRAM NOT IDENTICAL WITH STORED PROGRAMS; 5,377,355 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATED PROCEDURE INITIATION IN A DATA PRO- CESSING SYSTEM INCLUDING SOLICITING AN EVALUATION VOTE FROM USERS AUTO- MATICALLY DETERMINED IN RESPONSE TO IDENTIFICATION OF A FUNCTIONAL AREA ASSOCIATED WITH A DOCUMENT; 5,404,507 APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR FINDING RECORDS IN A DATABASE BY FORMULATING A QUERY USING EQUIVALENT TERMS WHICH CORRESPOND TO TERMS IN THE INPUT QUERY; 5,408,586 HISTORICAL DATABASE TRAINING METHOD FOR NEURAL NETWORKS; 5,408,655 USER INTERFACE SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRAVERSING A DATABASE; 5,371,676 APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING DATA OF COMPOUND WORDS; 5,185,888 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DATA MERGING/ SORTING AND SEARCHING USING A PLURALITY OF BIT-SLICED PROCESSING UNITS; 4,967,341 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROCESSING DATA BASE; ______________________________________
A person who places an article on the Internet typically intends for it to be available to all people who type in search terms that are even remotely related to the subject matter of the article. This increases the exposure of the article to the public searching the Internet. Such increased exposure can potentially increase product sales or advertising revenue for the owner of the article, especially if advertising revenue is related to the number of visits to the article or web site. Thus, there is an incentive to use as many search terms as are possibly related to the article. In fact, some articles or search engines use every word in the article as key terms. As a result, search engines will retrieve many articles which are unrelated to the subject matter which the user desires to find through a combination of search terms.
Further, some Internet users are not skilled in selecting and connecting key word search queries. These users will often type in a single word or two words connected by a Boolean "AND" operator. These searches are extremely broad and often retrieve thousands of articles which the user must manually search through by examining the title or other brief information about each article to find the desired information or advertisement.
As the total number of articles posted on the Internet continues to increase, there is an increasing number of articles retrieved with each search query. To find an article, the user must manually search through the retrieved articles and/or repeatedly modify the search query.